The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
as the term for
grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...
studied previously by
Emil Post
Emil Leon Post (; February 11, 1897 – April 21, 1954) was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory.
Life
Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Govern ...
and
Axel Thue (
Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the
Chomsky hierarchy:
context-sensitive grammars or
context-free grammars. In a broader sense, phrase structure grammars are also known as ''constituency grammars''. The defining character of phrase structure grammars is thus their adherence to the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation of
dependency grammars.
History
In 1956, Chomsky wrote, "A phrase-structure grammar is defined by a finite vocabulary (alphabet) V
p, and a finite set Σ of initial strings in V
p, and a finite set F of rules of the form: X → Y, where X and Y are strings in V
p."
Constituency relation
In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, phrase structure grammars are all those grammars that are based on the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation associated with dependency grammars; hence, phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars.
[Matthews (1981:71ff.) provides an insightful discussion of the distinction between constituency- and dependency-based grammars. See also Allerton (1979:238f.), McCawley (1988:13), Mel'cuk (1988:12-14), Borsley (1991:30f.), Sag and Wasow (1999:421f.), van Valin (2001:86ff.).] Any of several related theories for the
parsing of natural language qualify as constituency grammars, and most of them have been developed from Chomsky's work, including
*
Government and binding theory
*
Generalized phrase structure grammar
*
Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar
developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor t ...
*
Lexical functional grammar
* The
minimalist program
*
Nanosyntax
Further grammar frameworks and formalisms also qualify as constituency-based, although they may not think of themselves as having spawned from Chomsky's work, e.g.
*
Arc pair grammar, and
*
Categorial grammar.
See also
*
Catena
Notes
References
*Allerton, D. 1979. Essentials of grammatical theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
*Borsley, R. 1991
Syntactic theory: A unified approach London: Edward Arnold.
*Chomsky, Noam 1957.
Syntactic structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
*Matthews, P. Syntax. 1981. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, .
*McCawley, T. 1988. The syntactic phenomena of English, Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
*Mel'cuk, I. 1988
Dependency syntax: Theory and practice Albany: SUNY Press.
*
Sag, I. and T. Wasow. 1999. Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
*Tesnière, Lucien 1959. Éleménts de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.
*van Valin, R. 2001. An introduction to syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
{{div col end
Generative syntax
Syntax
Noam Chomsky
Natural language processing